Samantha Cornwell. Sam?
Over by the tourist office, she saw the eight-year-old boy who was waiting for the big bump. He was staying very close now to a woman pushing a pram, presumably his mother, and he was no longer laughing. Often the way with children, the bravado melting in the suddenly frightening heat of reality. The policewoman, Kelly, had known her psychology: just about the last thing this kid wanted to hear was a big bump that would resound in his room at bedtime.
Merrily, too, but what the hell could she do?
The sun bulged like a damaged eye behind purplish cloud. The couple known to George Lackland had shifted their cardboard placard closer to the castle wall.
ONLY THE POWER OF GOD CAN STOP THIS NOW.
Tell that to Nigel Saltash.
Mumford
Just the once, after denying everything with his usual contempt and arrogance and bravado, Jason Mebus tried to leg it.
Choosing his moment perfectly, when Mumford — and it could happen to anybody, there was nothing you could do — let go this unstoppable sneeze.
Bringing his knee up into Mumford’s crotch, not quite getting it right but enough to break free. Would have been well away, too, up the river bank, through the grounds of the derelict restaurant under the pines, if he hadn’t stopped for the parting gesture, like he always did on the CCTV pictures.
Vicious sneer and a rigid finger up at the camera.
With what he thought was a safe distance between them, he turned round and did it at Mumford, who was on his knees in the dirt.
Mumford did nothing — made a point, in fact, of showing no pain and looking unimpressed, like he’d merely bent to pick up a coin. Which was when Jason started screaming that if he’d had his way, they’d have finished hanging Robbie Walsh. Finished off the job by the time the Collins kid had started crying and run out of the shed and gone to fetch his dipshit dad.
As it was, they’d cut the little gayboy down and they were out of there. Which was a shame, all the trouble they’d gone to, to fix it up like a suicide, even ripping the hanging page out of the history book so it could be left by the body, and then putting the book back in Walsh’s school bag.
Jason telling him all this just in case Mumford thought he was dealing with an amateur. How it would’ve gone down as suicide, no problem ’cause everybody knew Walshie was having a bad time on the Plascarreg. But enough people would know what had really happened to make it crystal clear that there were certain individuals on this estate that you did not fuck with.
‘Now that’s a lie, ennit, Jason?’ Mumford said, back on his feet, strolling nonchalantly towards the vermin. ‘No way, see, that you’d leave a body in a shed next to a crack factory.’
‘Nah, that was gonner be over, anyway,’ Jason said. ‘Couldn’t trust that unit no more. He might’ve told somebody. Might even’ve told you, dad.’
Jason backing off the whole time, along the edge of the water. Knowing he was safe, with his long legs, from this overweight old bastard. Telling Mumford that if his fat face was ever seen on the Plascarreg again it was gonner get sliced off.
Bringing his hand down like a guillotine.
‘Sliced off like a side of bacon, dad.’
And it was as he was saying these actual words, making the gesture, that he backed into an empty petrol can with one of his heels and turned round too quickly and lost his footing and nearly went in the river.
Mumford — brain inflamed with the images of Robbie’s suffering that Jason had so lovingly invoked, and moving pretty near as fast as when he was a promising athlete in his teens and early twenties — went to rescue the boy, at the same time taking him down with a sharp little knuckle-punch to the throat.
Jason retching pitifully, but all Mumford could hear was him saying, with his casual, hard-boy confidence,
The last laugh being at the top of the Keep, at Ludlow Castle.
All added up. They wouldn’t have known about the significance, to Robbie, of the Hanging Tower. The Keep, with steps all the way to the top, was so much easier. What was also useful was that, instead of landing on the public footpath outside, for all to see, the body would drop privately into what they called the Outer Bailey, all locked up for the night.
Jason or, more likely, two of them — Jason and Chain-boy, say — would’ve hidden out somewhere in the castle with Robbie till the place was closed and then taken him up there, thrown him off, quietly vacated the premises, with all the time in the world. No, they weren’t amateurs, these boys.
So why hadn’t Robbie told anybody about the hanging?
Or had he? Could be Robbie had told Mathiesson. Mumford could hear the toe-rag laughing. Gotter be a man… stand up to ’em. Telling himself that Robbie had exaggerated the story. Not telling Angela anything.
Mumford drew back his foot as Jason tried to get up. Pity it was only a trainer.
Still, Jason was cowering away, his eyes alive with fear. Or mabbe it was the look on Mumford’s face that did that — Mumford listening to his poor drowned mother.
Uncle Andy, who could easily have gone that very morning to the house opposite Tesco’s and had a long and meaningful chat with Robbie, probably ending with a full statement and Robbie not having time to go to the castle that afternoon and therefore still being alive.
Had this not been the same Uncle Andy who just couldn’t face the thought of his old man formally welcoming him to the wonderful world of retirement.
Another time, another place, Andy was going to weep.
And he wasn’t stupid. Knew that what he was doing now was no substitute, was unlikely to make him feel any better.
But at least Uncle Andy was finally here for Robbie Walsh and all the other Robbie Walshes who would be hanged, cut, beaten by this scum who had every reason to think the useless, bureaucratic, CPS-constricted police service was never gonner touch him.
Mumford looked down at him.
‘This river, Jason, the Wye. When I was a boy, much younger than you, folks used to say the River Wye demanded a sacrifice every year. Used to say the mothers was always scared to let their kids go anywhere near the water till somebody somewhere had been pulled out dead. You yeard that one?’
Jason said nothing. There was drool all over his mouth, and his eyes were wet. His famous jacket, with all the zips, had split under an arm.
‘Some very old man was considered best,’ Mumford said. ‘Or a drunk. Or a tramp.’
Jason snuffled and rolled away from the water’s edge.
‘Or anybody that wouldn’t be missed,’ Mumford said, thinking how primitive and tribal this had been for the 1950s.
‘But we was told we better be good kiddies else
A few minutes later, as he began a more formal interrogation of the suspect, the possibility that this would not end with Jason’s death and disposal in the River Wye had dwindled to a minuscule point of light at the end of a
